The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has approved a deficit budget of Rs700 million for the fiscal year 2012-13 in its recent Governing Board (GB) meeting chaired by the board’s chairman Zaka Ashraf.

The amount is an improvement on the Rs1.1b deficit budget that was announced last year.

“The amount is a tremendous improvement,” a GB member told The Express Tribune.

A major chunk of the budget has been set aside for infrastructure development. The board had initially planned to spend a lot on administration but the GB members were against that move and asked Ashraf to allot that to development instead.

“There are several stadiums that need renovation. There are academies and high-performance centres that need modification so we believed that infrastructure development should get the major share of the budget and the chairman agreed to that.”

The PCB is building two high-performance centres in Karachi and Multan along the same lines as Lahore’s National Cricket Academy. It also intends to build a new stadium in Islamabad and Larkana and the addition of a new head office in interior Sindh was also discussed.

The GB members also raised questions over the continued existence of Javed Miandad in the PCB who, despite being paid a hefty amount per month, does not play an active role in the board. Meanwhile, four regions have also been added to Pakistan cricket – nominated by Patron-in-Chief Asif Ali Zardari – which did not please the GB members.

“Dera Murad Bugti, Larkana, Fata and Bahawalpur are now active regions. Bahawalpur is a good inclusion and Fata has tremendous talent but the other two regions have been included on political grounds. The teams of Quetta and Hyderabad don’t even have 11 good players.”